13:8
For a while they traveled through clear sky. Even knowing Air wove around her and likely would catch her if she fell, Kim still found it difficult to shift her attention from the beanstalk to look at the landscape falling away below them. Finally curiosity overrode trepidation. She carefully turned her chin to the side so her gaze shifted from beanstalk to air.
Looking down, she took in the landscape falling away below them. From their vantage point quite a distance above the ground, and she wasn’t going to focus on that again, the world broke into a patchwork quilt. Sections of grass green butted up against darker green of forests. Brown appeared to be tilled fields. A big section was the grey, black, white, and brown of buildings making up the majority of Ourton with clusters of similar colors and shapes further afield, separated from the main section by patches of lighter green, dark green, and brown.
The view was—It was. Something so damned beautiful that also put things into perspective – badum bum. Perspective, get it? Whatever, she amused herself. While there was no doubt visual perspective involved, it also felt philosophical. Like all the things that felt so big and important, from this height, didn’t seem that big any longer.
From above her Patti’s voice sang about drunk sailors and razors and someone named Calypso. Every few lines the rest of the group joined in with “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!”
“Gwen!” Ivan’s snap carried to Kim. “Keep ahold of the branches!”
“But– But, this calls for dramatic arm swinging!” Was Gwen’s response. Kim couldn’t see her friend but she had a distinct image in her mind now. “I need a tankard. Or a bottle of rum!”
“Yes, and I need you to not fall off the beanstalk.” Ivan’s tone was dry. Kim could picture his face as easily as she could Gwen’s. And it was, as Patti had previously said, very ‘Daddy’.
“Fine!” Gwen gave a long-suffering, very dramatic, sigh. “Spoilsport.”
She said it like she was expected to, but it lacked her usual humor. Guess the feeling that this wasn’t a laughing moment was shared across the group.
Hearts were heavy. Another one of them being taken drove home there vulnerability. Where was safe when They could be anywhere? They needed information or they would be reacting instead of acting forever.
If possible the beanstalk picked up more speed. The air whipped around Kim, stinging her eyes. She closed them and pressed her forehead to the beanstalk, releasing a little more Magick to travel down it and back to the roots and the earth as she did so.
Patti’s song should have been snatched away by the very present wind but instead it continued to use Kim as a conduit, sending the Magick of the combined group’s singing through her, down the beanstalk, and into the earth. The wind did distort the other’s singing, making it feel like “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum” was coming from all directions while Patti’s singing about sailing alone hit the crown of Kim’s head before traveling like liquid music through her.
“Clear!” Ben’s voice called down. “Jump off, Abe!”
“Jumping!” Abe’s piping voice carried on the wind.
Voices continued to call locations while the beanstalk continued its upward growth. It did seem to slow a bit, probably to accommodate the debarking.
It was only when Kim’s head was cresting the cloud cover that she realized they’d had no flying creature attacks. Maybe they’d been traveling too fast? She’d think their presence went unknown but there was too much loud Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum-ing to pretend that could be the case.
Whatever. One less thing.
The beanstalk stopped growing as her feet cleared the thickest part of cloud. There was still clouds, seeing as how they made up what passed for ground up here, but they were wispier and swirled around Kim’s legs as she stepped away from the beanstalk.
As before she did a bouncy step just to confirm the cloud under foot that made up the ‘ground’ would hold and she wasn’t going to go plummeting to her death far below. It did. It didn’t feel like earth. It lacked the firmness, the solidity. But it held and that was the best she figured she could ask for. Plummeting to her death was unappealing though she had a pretty strong idea that Air would catch her. Still, why test it if she didn’t have to?
The cloud-ground gave slightly beneath her feet as she walked over to join the group clustered a little distance from the beanstalk, kind of like a rubber running track. Not spongy but not not-spongy. It alternately made her feel like she was walking slower than normal and like she was about to launch herself into the air.
Air swirled around her, dispersing the cloud cover from her knees up and clearing her view of the castle on the horizon.
“So,” Patti asked, “We go to the castle?”
Siobhan nodded. “We go to the castle.”
“Cool, cool.” After a quick look down to Sass, Patti started off across the clouds separating them from the castle. She bounded rather than walked or ran, clearing long spans of air with each leap. Abe cast a quick look at Dan then started hopping and leaping after Patti.
#
“They are on the beanstalk.” The low male rumble slid over Dempsey, warped by the sound of his pulse playing loud in his head.
“Have ARFA slow them,” the woman, Mary, replied.
“I tried. ARFA is sluggish.”
“That doesn’t make any sense! It’s a super machine. It doesn’t get sluggish. ARFA!”
A multilayered voice responded, “Yes?”
“Stop them!”
“I am trying. Something is hampering me.”
“No.” A foot stomp. “That isn’t right.”
“And yet, it is true.” There was a pause and then the multilayered voice added, “This story has already been told. The code is written. It cannot be altered.”
“Alter it!” Mary’s voice rose on a screech.
“I cannot. It has been run.”
“Then restart the story! Stories can be retold!”
There was a long pause in which Mary grumbled something beneath her breath. Magick stirred the air, strong enough Dempsey felt it seeping through his skin and touching beneath it in such a way to suggest it was brushing his soul.
ARFA’s voice sounded almost bored. “No matter how you push, Mary, I cannot. It is not that I will not, but that I cannot.” She emphasized repeated word. “The sequence has been run. The output has been generated.”
“I told you not to try to return to a finished story,” The male, Geppetto, said.
“Shut up!” Mary snapped. “This was the one that suited Mr. Dempsey best. I had to pick it!” Stomp. Stomp. “We have very few stories left untold and none of them fit him!”
“Perhaps if you didn’t insist on doing this in ARFA.”
“I control ARFA. This is the safest place for us.”
“How much time do we have?” Geppetto pitched his voice in such a way it was clear he was not talking to Mary.
To confirm this, it was ARFA that responded. “I cannot say.”
“Cannot?” Again Mary screeched. Then there was the sound of stomping and her voice grew closer to Dempsey. “Mr. Dempsey!” Something poked him in the side. “Wake up!”
Dempsey drew a slow breath through his nostrils and relaxed all his muscles. He felt the strands tighten against him, letting him know he was still bound. He considered testing them by moving his leg but the fact was determining if he was bound or not was almost irrelevant. He was alone with two maniacs. Bound or not bound was almost irrelevant.
He was just setting into remaining unconscious, or at least appearing to be, when his head was jerked upright and his eyelids snapped up involuntarily. Determined as he was to remain quiescent, his eyelids seemed to have other plans. It felt like there were tiny little fishhooks in them. They tugged to the point of pain before relaxing a slight bit. His eyeballs stung as light hit his pupils, causing them to contract hard and fast.
His vision was blurry, probably a combination of whatever they’d knocked him out with along with the sudden blast of light. A vaguely human shape resolved from the blur.
“Oh, there you are.”
It was then he realized he was suspended, face down, with a space about the length of his height between him and the floor. No longer making any attempt to pretend to be out, he thrashed against the threads binding him. He swayed very slightly before the threads tightened, stilling his movements.
He tried to blink to clear his vision but the hooks in his eyelids made it impossible. What was the goal there? He twitched the muscles in his cheeks, wiggling his lower eyelids until they almost met the stretched upper ones but it didn’t help the dryness of his eyeballs that much. In fact it made his eyes cross and made it harder to see the person standing beneath him with their neck craned.
“G! Let him down a little. Looking up at our guest is hurting my neck!”
There was a sudden slackening of the cocoon of threads and Dempsey dropped for a mikro before being jerked to a stop with his face a short distance from Mary’s. That close he was able to make out some of her features, though it still looked like he was seeing her through a grease-smeared lens. Rounded cheeks came into focus. Above them pale blue eyes stared intently into his stretched open ones. Her hair fell around her, a muted cloud that framed her face. It was some shade of dark. Again, the state of his eyes and the fuzziness of his brain made the details blurry.
He tried to shift his gaze to take in more of the space. Before he could get more than an impression of blurry edges and air that seemed to wobble in time with his pulse, Mary grabbed his chin between her fingers and forced him to meet her gaze.
“Why?” He forced the question out over dry lips.
“Why what, dear?” She spoke in a tone of such artificial sweetness his teeth hurt. In the back of his mind he wondered if it was her natural speaking voice or one she put on to invoke a response from men. He suspected it was for men. Any woman he knew would hear that tone and back away, possibly muttering something about house’s made of candy and the dangers therein.
If he wasn’t suspended and basically immobile he would have jerked away from that voice. But he was. And he couldn’t.
“Why am I here?”
“You have something we need. Several somethings. I’d like them back.”
No further explanation, but it didn’t really need it. He had a lot of things. A lot. But, it stood to reason she meant the ring, emerald, cloak, crown, bee, and sword he recovered from Gryphon, Grace, Roanne, Bria, Gia, and Siobhan. Five of them teaming with weird Magicks and one with a void that suggested a need to be filled.
“You want to give them to me.” The level of confidence in how she said that made Dempsey think this woman was rarely told no. And if she was, she did not hear it. Maybe he should say the level of delusion? Could be a combo of both, he guessed.
Her grasp made Dempsey realize that his face, separate from his eyelids, was largely free of threads. Instinct had him trying to blink to clear his vision more but the threads holding his upper lids made it impossible. Guess he just wasn’t going to be able to see great. Oh, well.
Having control of his mouth let him reply, “No.”
His jaw moved against her hand as he said it. Pain shot from the point of contact when she tightened her grip.
“No?”
“No.” He set his jaw mulishly and rolled his eyes, shifting his gaze anywhere but her blue eyes.
“Maybe we can give you some incentive. G?”
“Mary?”
“Make him hurt.”
No sooner had she said this then Dempsey felt every point on his body where Geppetto’s threads pierced him. One moment the cocoon around him felt almost silken, the next it might as well have been razor-wire. He expected his clothes would give him some protection, but it didn’t feel like it.
The threads tightened and then they dug in. He felt something within him – his Magick, his soul? – contract away from the things, but he might as well have been spitting into the wind. Tighter, sharper. The pain flowed through him in pulsing waves. Bile rose up his throat and he clenched his jaw to keep it from erupting from his mouth.
“G?” Mary’s voice warped. Dempsey’s vision pulsed. Dark crept in along the edges. “Stop.”
As soon as she said stop, the pressure released. Dempsey still remained cocooned but the cocoon morphed back to something a bit softer. He still felt the bite of the strands, digging into his Spirit, but they no longer cut like the wire on a cheese slicer.
A tear released from his eye, cascading towards Mary. She lifted a hand and caught it in her palm before holding it up to her lips where she lapped it up with her tongue. Like a lizard, that tongue was too long. Or maybe it was just the grotesque motion making it seem so.
Everything inside Dempsey recoiled. A chill chased through him. He would have shuddered, given the range to do so. Instead all he could do was lie there, suspended in threads, and fight to not puke.
“We can make it stop hurting. I don’t like hurting people.” Something told Dempsey that was a big lie. Like the kind that had to burn coming out. “Just give us our things back.”
Dempsey wet his dry lips with his tongue. Even so his mouth felt like it cracked when he croaked out, “No.”
“But you want to.”
Was she delusional? Dempsey was pretty sure she was delusional. There was such conviction in her voice. She actually believed what she said. That he wanted to give her anything she asked for.
“No.” His voice was growing weaker despite the strength of his denial. He just had to hold on until the others arrived. Geppetto had said they were on the beanstalk. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he assumed it meant they were coming.
“G? Please convince Mr. Dempsey.”
Geppetto didn’t respond. Well, not in words. But suddenly the threads tightened and morphed back to razor wire. If Dempsey had thought they’d dug before, well, now the earlier touch felt like a lover’s caress. Every single nerve ending in his body fired as the threads dug in.
Heat and cold and what felt like acid burned through him. A scream tore from his dry throat and he couldn’t stop it from carrying and carrying, feeling like his Spirit was trying to escape from his gaping mouth as his chest heaved in the tightening cocoon.
His head slumped forward, the thread holding his eyelids open tearing. Blood flowed into his eyes and he clamped his eyelids shut over them. The darkness behind his lids pulsed with varicolored lights then white flared, starting as a pinprick of light in the technicolor swath then expanding rapidly until his mind was nothing but bright white. His limbs went stiff and then slack in the thread cocoon.
The last thing Dempsey heard was Mary saying in her cloyingly sweet voice, “Oh, dear,” before his brain shut down to escape the pain.
Enter The Woods 